by Patrick Lee
She leaned close and whispered against his ear. “They won’t buy this for long. We’ve got a couple minutes, tops.”
He nodded.
She drew back, then pressed in again. “I suspected, but I wasn’t sure. How’d you know?”
“She didn’t react to your last name. She should’ve, if she was close with your dad.”
“I thought the rock salt out front was overdone. Should’ve just been a path to the truck. Now we know why there was so much.”
Travis nodded again. Sometime last night a group of people had descended on this place. Maybe they’d parked on the road and come around behind the house to hide their footprints. Maybe the woman—the decoy—had rung the doorbell alone and gotten Carrie Holden to open up. Whatever had followed had been fast and brutal, and left lots of tracks going in. All of which had been erased by the salt.
Travis indicated the woman on the chair. “Find something to bind her with. I’ll find Carrie.”
Paige headed for an open closet near the entry. Even from here Travis could see random articles of clothing inside. Long-sleeved shirts whose arms would do fine as makeshift ropes.
He turned his attention farther down the back hall, past the bathroom. There were two doorways at the end, facing each other, both open. One room dark, one lit.
He hadn’t bothered to ask, in writing, whether Carrie Holden was still alive. Partly that was because he’d been in a hurry, but mostly it was because he’d assumed she was. Anyone who’d gone to this much trouble to set a trap for him and Paige must have a good reason to take them alive—it would’ve been far easier to open fire on the Jeep the moment they pulled in. Certainly that approach wouldn’t have required finding a passable lookalike. It followed that the aggressors would keep Carrie alive, too—the more Tangent prisoners, the merrier.
He advanced along the hall.
Dark room, lit room.
The decoy had been waiting in the lit one. She’d turned on the light when he rang the doorbell. It seemed likely that Carrie was in that same room: the impostor would want to keep an eye on her.
It occurred to Travis that the woman could’ve lied about the people watching this place: they could well be inside right now. They could be in either or both of the rooms ahead. In any such scenario he was outgunned. It almost wasn’t worth drawing his SIG. He drew it anyway. If someone was about to take him out, he might as well return the favor as best he could.
Behind him he heard Paige tying the woman’s wrists and ankles. The sound was vague, indistinct. To a listener it might have been someone shifting awkwardly in a seat.
Travis covered the last ten feet of the hallway at a fast walk, reached into the dark room to where the light switch had to be, and flipped it.
Home office. Big oak desk with a laptop and a green glass-shaded lamp and a scattering of papers. No closet. Nowhere for anyone to hide.
Travis spun in the hall and faced the other room. Carrie’s bedroom. Bigger than the office. Walk-in closet on the far wall, full of clothes and random boxes. No one hiding there, either. No one hiding anywhere, here. There was only Carrie Holden herself, bound and gagged with duct tape on the floor beside the bed, staring up at him with wide and alert eyes.
He holstered the gun and crossed to her, kneeling and putting a finger to his lips as he met her stare.
He removed the tape from her face first; it was triple wrapped but the overlap was sloppy, leaving the lowest layer exposed at the edge. Travis tore through it easily and pulled all three pieces aside. Carrie took a deeper breath than she’d probably taken in hours.
“Do you have a gun here?” Travis whispered.
Carrie nodded.
“Are you good with it?”
Another nod, accompanied by a look—mild annoyance at the question. Which boded well.
Travis considered what he’d seen of the cabin’s layout so far. One fact stood out: there was no back door. No easy way in or out but the entry he and Paige had used.
That was good.
He met Carrie’s stare again as he turned his attention to the rest of her binds.
“We can make it out of here alive,” he whispered, “but you have to do exactly what I say.”
As he freed her wrists he began to explain the plan.
Chapter Nine
Every instinct told Dominic something was wrong. The decoy’s decision to use the bathroom was entirely out of line. Granted, she wasn’t a professional at this kind of work—Dominic had no idea where his employers had found her, though without a doubt she’d come from somewhere within their own ranks. Probably high in the ranks. She was someone. Or someone’s sister or mother. They would’ve only chosen somebody whose loyalty was beyond question.
What wasn’t beyond question was her capability. Clearly she had no experience at being a stand-in. Who the hell did, aside from undercover cops and a few deep-cover intel people? It was pressure work of the worst kind. Contrary to what some believed, deception did not come naturally to most people. Even telling a small lie triggered all kinds of stress reactions, and this woman was telling a big one.
For all that, she’d done well at first. Right on script, as far as Dominic could tell. Her job was to get the visitors talking. Get them to disclose what they knew about Scalar—whatever the hell that was—in a setting where they felt comfortable enough to speak freely. Later on, after the team had taken them, there would be time to interrogate them at length, but that sort of questioning was chancy at best; Dominic knew that from long experience. You could torture someone for a computer password or a vault lock combination—information that could be confirmed on the spot—but you could rarely get at their deeper secrets. Broad, general information was hard to extract by brutal means. You couldn’t force the answers when you didn’t even have the questions.
Hence the decoy.
And she’d done fine until the bathroom thing.
Maybe her nerves had gotten to her. Maybe she’d needed a break to rein in the jitters and refocus. Splash some water on her face.
Maybe.
Offhand, Dominic could think of no other reason. If there was another reason, it was something bad. Something very fucking bad.
He spoke into the microphone that extended from his earpiece. “What are you seeing?”
The team leader near the cabin responded softly. “Nothing you’re not seeing.”
“I don’t like this,” Dominic said.
“Same. Standing by—for now.”
Travis finished whispering the plan as he got Carrie to her feet. She winced at the stiffness in her joints but looked steady enough.
Paige was standing in the doorway—Travis realized she’d been there for some time.
“Need me to repeat it?” he said.
She shook her head. “I heard.”
Travis guided Carrie into the hallway and the three of them returned to the living room.
Paige had done a thorough job on the decoy. She lay on the floor at the base of her chair, her wrists tied behind her with one arm of a cardigan, her ankles with the other. The sleeve of a wool sweater had been wedged between her teeth and tied around her head. There was some risk of her waking up and making noise—banging against the furniture if nothing else—but Travis wasn’t worried. One way or another, this would all be over in the next minute or two.
He wondered where the listening device was, but didn’t look for it. It could be anywhere. Under the couch. Tacked beneath the top of the end table.
He spoke at room volume: “She seems nervous, doesn’t she?”
“Probably just caught off guard,” Paige said. “It’s not every morning she gets a visit from Tangent.”
Travis moved silently across to the bathroom. He eased the door open, slipped inside and closed it gently behind him. Then he flushed the toilet, banged the lid down, and turned on the faucet.
Dominic relaxed a notch.
“You hearing this?” he said. The running water was just audible over the feed.
> “Got it. Guess she just had to go. Jesus.”
A moment later the faucet shut off and the door clicked open.
“Sorry about that,” he heard the decoy say. Her tone sounded different—probably because of her distance from the microphone. “Please continue.”
The young female visitor spoke. “As I said before, Garner’s death has some connection to Scalar—”
The young woman stopped speaking. Dominic cupped his hand over the earpiece and listened carefully, but couldn’t hear anything happening—any reason for her to have cut herself off.
“What’s going on?” the team leader said.
“Quiet,” Dominic said.
For three more seconds the silence held.
Then the older woman spoke. “Is there a problem?”
Dominic’s stomach tightened. He thought he knew what was coming.
It came.
The young woman said, “You’re not Carrie Holden.”
Fuck.
The team leader spoke up, fast and tense: “Ready to move on my mark.”
“I beg your pardon?” the decoy said.
There was no reply from either the young woman or her male friend. Instead there came a burst of commotion. Furniture sliding. Bodies interacting. Voices raised and jumbled over one another. The male visitor said, “Get her legs!”
“Move now!” the team leader said. “Now, now, now!”
Two seconds after that Dominic saw the team sprinting into the pool of light in front of the cabin. All five of them, Heckler & Koch automatics in hand, rushing the front door in a tight group. Like a sledgehammer coming down on a knuckle.
Travis gave the end table a kick to create the last of the commotion, then turned and ran for the firing position he’d picked out moments earlier. Paige and Carrie had each already settled into theirs—Paige behind the corner at the hallway’s mouth, Carrie behind the iron woodstove. Carrie had retrieved her own pistol—a Beretta 92FS—during the long silence in the living room.
Travis reached his cover: an island in the kitchen. He dropped to a knee behind it, drew his SIG and leveled it on the door.
Already he could hear the footsteps outside, crunching hard on the exposed gravel. Seconds away.
Three protected shooting angles on a solitary chokepoint, against aggressors who didn’t even expect to come under fire—who expected to burst in on a scuffle among unprepared subjects.
Travis took a breath and steadied his hand on the granite.
The footsteps outside covered the last stretch to the door. Whoever was leading the pack didn’t stutter-step. He hit the lock at full speed and the latch-plate splintered from the frame and the door exploded inward.
Dominic didn’t really expect to hear shooting. The team would seek only to control the situation. At most they’d trigger a few three-round bursts into the ceiling for intimidation, though even that was unlikely. These men were professionals. They knew how to assert themselves without theatrics. And their orders were explicit: take the subjects alive. Gunfire of any kind would be an unnecessary risk.
Dominic’s own orders were in the same vein. His role was to disable the visitors’ vehicle if necessary—one shot to the engine block would do—but otherwise to withhold fire.
Only under the most implausible scenario, in which the visitors eluded the team and seemed likely to escape, was Dominic to engage them with lethal force.
It wouldn’t come to that. The decoy plan had failed pretty miserably—almost comically—but the rest would be warm butter on toast.
He was thinking that very thing when he heard the front door crash in—and right on top of that sound came the first gunshots. He flinched and tore out his earpiece, but not before recognizing what he was hearing: not the 9mm bursts the team would fire, but single shots of something heavier. Forty-caliber Smith and Wesson, it sounded like. And maybe a few 9mm shots among them, but not in three-round bursts. All the shots were sporadic but one at a time.
Then it was over.
Three seconds, start to finish.
In the silence he heard his pulse in his ears. And the wind sighing over the ridge into the valley, pushing the big snowflakes almost sideways.
He felt for his earpiece and put it back in place, but for the longest time he heard nothing.
Travis stood and surveyed the aftermath. His eyes picked out the relevant points in order of importance.
Paige and Carrie were unhurt.
All the bodies in the entry were down and still.
There was no one else coming in. No footsteps outside. No voices. Just empty darkness and blowing snow.
The decoy was still lying bound in front of the chair. Still unconscious. And unharmed.
The women stood from their cover. They met each other’s eyes, and Travis’s.
Travis crossed from the kitchen to the front door, his gun still trained on the bodies. He scrutinized them, saw that each had taken at least one headshot, and felt his tension step down a degree.
A second later it stepped back up.
Five bodies.
In his mind he saw the decoy extending five digits of one hand, then adding another finger with a shrug.
Five, maybe six.
If there was a sixth man, where was he? Why wasn’t he with the group?
Travis thought of the terrain surrounding the cabin, and the answer suggested itself. And made his skin prickle.
A lookout, up high. Almost certainly armed.
He saw earpieces on each of the corpses. He stooped and took the nearest one, and fixed it to his own ear.
“Are you listening?” he said. “Do you hear that? That’s the sound of none of your friends breathing.”
He waited.
No reply.
He hoped he was talking to dead air. But doubted it.
Dominic had already swiveled the mouthpiece behind his head so the man wouldn’t hear his breath. He kept the earpiece in place. He listened. Time drew out. It felt like the audio equivalent of a stare-down.
“Correction,” the man in the cabin said. “One of your friends is breathing. The nice old lady who lied to us. I guess it’s possible she’s not really your friend—but she’s somebody’s friend, isn’t she? I bet she matters to the people who hired you.”
Dominic felt his adrenaline begin to climb. He could see exactly where this was going.
“She has to be someone personally close to them,” the man said. “Who else would they trust to do this? I don’t think they found her on Craigslist.”
Fuck. Fuck.
“So here’s how this happens,” the man continued. “The three of us, plus your decoy, are leaving right now. In a tight group. You won’t have a shot that doesn’t risk hitting her. We’re going to stay tight all the way to the Jeep, and we’re going to sit tight inside the Jeep, and we’re going to keep it that way until we’re long gone. And if you try to kill the vehicle and strand us here, my first move is to put her brains in the snow. Try me if you think I’m bluffing.”
A hard plastic clatter ended the speech: the man had dropped the earpiece on the floor.
He wasn’t bluffing. Dominic was clear on that. Even if he’d thought it was a bluff, he couldn’t have taken the chance. He had no idea who the decoy really was—therefore risking her life wasn’t his decision.
It was someone else’s.
He reached into his parka and withdrew the blue cell phone. He double-pressed the send button and saw the display light up, the phone already dialing the man who’d called him last night.
First ring. No answer.
Far below, a broad shape emerged from the cabin. Four bodies clumped together. Three walking, one being carried. Even without looking through the Remington’s scope Dominic could see there was no shot. No single head was distinct—they were all shoved together in a silhouetted mass.
Second ring. No answer.
The group reached the Jeep and piled in and the engine roared. The headlights came on.
Third ring.
No answer.
The vehicle backed around in a tight arc until it faced the road, then lunged forward, taking the turn fast and racing away down the valley toward town.
Fourth ring. No answer.
Dominic put his eye to the scope and centered the reticle on the Jeep. He did the math, the variables stacking up automatically in his head: range, velocity, elevation, time.
He could kill the vehicle easily right now. Once that was done he could put shot after shot into the passenger compartment, then sprint down to it and make a thorough finish.
That would hold true for maybe twenty seconds, given the Jeep’s speed. After that it would be more luck than skill.
Twenty seconds, if the call connected right now.
Twenty seconds to explain the situation and get a decision.
Nineteen seconds.
Fifth ring. A click on the line. A man’s voice: “Talk to me.”
Travis hated having the headlights on, making an easier target of the vehicle, but he had no choice. Under this cloudcover the valley would be ink black, and he couldn’t afford to lose the road. Burying the Jeep in snow would be fatal if there really was a sixth man back there.
A memory from childhood came to him: Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. Some point along this road represented the fabled bridge, the margin beyond which they would be safe.
He was certain they hadn’t reached it yet.
Paige was next to him in the passenger seat. Carrie sat centered behind them, leaning forward over the console. She had the decoy slumped across her lap, still bound, the Beretta pressed to her head in case she woke. Which she seemed to be doing—she was making noises.
How long since they’d pulled onto this road? Ten seconds? Fifteen?
Ahead lay the town, bright and welcoming beyond the darkness that engulfed the Jeep. They were ten seconds shy of the light when the first bullet hit. It struck the left edge of the hood with a sound like a baseball bat’s impact, but deflected without penetrating the metal. Travis felt the others flinch, and his hands jerked on the wheel, and for a terrible second the vehicle began to fishtail on the snowy road. The back end went left, the wheels spinning without purchase. A second shot skipped off the hard top three inches above Travis’s head. He felt cold air seethe down through the resulting rupture in the material. Then the Jeep straightened and surged forward again, and for the next three seconds nothing happened except that the town got closer and the darkness ahead of them got shorter. Three seconds for them to think they might make it.
